The “Worthless” Prairie

•October 14, 2026•

by Janet Roney

Many of Moultrie County’s first settlers in the mid-1820s and 1830s were born in Virginia, the Carolinas, Tennessee, or Kentucky. They were used to farming small patches of sandy soil in the valleys between timber covered hills. When they arrived on the prairies of Illinois, they did not know what to do with this flat, swampy land covered with ten-foot-tall grass with roots so matted in thick deep sod that their crude wooden plows edged with a piece of iron were useless.  

They soon learned they needed a “breaking plow” hitched to three yokes of oxen or six teams of work horses to pull it through the virgin prairie sod. Even then, the rich sticky black soil would not scour well off of the thick iron blade, so the driver had to stop and clean the blade every few minutes. Some farmers who couldn’t afford to buy or hire a breaking plow and oxen, tried to break up the soil with an axe or heavy hoe. That was too labor intensive, and that ancient form of “minimum tillage” did not produce much corn.

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